The practice of creating a threat model can help teams proactively understand and develop a strategy for managing the possible vulnerabilities their organization faces, instead of waiting until after an incident occurs. OWASP defines threat modeling as “a procedure for optimizing security by identifying objectives and vulnerabilities, and then defining countermeasures to prevent, or mitigate the effects of, threats to the system.”

SecOps teams can benefit from creating a threat model for cloud infrastructure, and defining an approach to operationalizing, hardening, and automating security throughout the software development lifecycle. While it’s best to build security into the design of your systems at the outset, remember the motto: “Threat Modeling: The sooner the better, but never too late.”